computational imaging

Adobe, Apple, and Google are all intent on making smartphone photography as capable as standalone-camera photography — maybe better. Adobe is teasing its vision for fixing portrait photos taken with mobile devices.

Silicon Valley has no shortage of startups that have planned to revolutionize photography using computational imaging. But one of the oldest startups of them all, Apple, aims to be one of the first to get a mass market product out the door.

Lytro, after admitting that its overly expensive, low-resolution light field camera was merely a “novelty,” has announced its new Illum camera. The Illum is much larger than its predecessor, packing a sensor that’s four times the size (40 “megarays”), and an appropriately larger lens in front of that sensor (though the same 8x optical zoom and f/2.0 aperture remain). The Illum also looks a lot like a real DSLR, rather than the rather odd pocket kaleidoscopesque appearance of the original Lytro Camera. The Lytro Illum will be available in July 2014 at a retail price of $1600.